September 12, 2017

SOS Coast Guard 1942

I found the DVD of SOS Coast Guard for less than two bucks so I picked it up. This is the 1942 feature version of the 1937 serial with the same name. It's edited from the serial with some small bit of new footage that was filmed at the time of the original shoot. Ralph Byrd is a Coast Guard officer and Boris Karloff is the mad scientist.

The Wikipedia says: It was made during the 2-year period when the Hayes Office put a moratorium on horror movies, Lugosi's usual genre, and in the midst of Byrd's notoriety for the highly popular Dick Tracy serials. I can't find anything on Byrd's notoriety but I did see he died rather young, 43, in 1952.

It was the most expensive Republic serial of 1937 with a cost of $128,530 until The Lone Ranger serial the following year.

Ralph looks so intense there. He's on the trail of Boris and his gang of thugs. He spends the movie chasing down the gang, so there's some good bit of fighting and car chases. It's a good serial and the movie manages to capture most of that. The nice thing about the feature version is there aren't all the chapter intro and exits to fast forward through. I put a link in the post for the serial but I couldn't find the feature on YouTube. Oh, well, huh. You might enjoy the serial. It's worth checking out.